Praying the Office with St Benedict 4: On praise and adoration

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One of the much debated aspects of the Divine Office over the last fifty years or so has been, what precisely is its purpose?

Cathedral vs monastic?

For much of the last century, the prevailing consensus is that there were two main types of ‘Divine Office’, monastic and ‘cathedral’.  The monastic office, it was held, was originally at least, designed primarily to feed the meditation of individual monk; the cathedral was more ecclesial and intercessory in character.  

Neither of these conceptions, however, really capture what is perhaps the first and most obvious purpose of the Office, namely the pure praise of God for his goodness. 

The pure praise of God

The very first words the Benedictine monk says each day, after all, at least according to the Rule, is a verse of Psalm 50, repeated thrice, namely, O God open my lips that my mouth may proclaim your praise. [1]

And the Invitatory psalm, Psalm 94 continues this theme inviting us to:

 Come let us praise the Lord with joy: let us joyfully sing to God our saviour. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving; and make a joyful noise to him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains are his. For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. Come let us adore and fall down: and weep before the Lord that made us. For he is the Lord our God: and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. [2]

For this reason, Pope Benedict XIV suggested that:

Monks pray first and foremost not for any specific intention, but simply because God is worthy of being praised. “Confitemini Domino, quoniam bonus! – Praise the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy is eternal!”: so we are urged by a number of Psalms (e.g. Ps 106:1)... [3]

This is certainly an important starting point for our consideration of the Office, since it impacts, I want to suggest, directly on the arrangement of the psalm cursus, and indeed on the whole design of the Benedictine Office.

The repeated memes

I've already noted some of the elements of the Office repeated each day, that reiterate this objective, in the opening verse (from Psalm 50), and Psalm 94 at Matins.

There are several other repeated reminders though: at Lauds each day, for example, the theme is continued in Psalm 50's daily recitation; in the Laudate psalms at Lauds; and again before sleep at Compline, in Psalm 4's injunction to offer the sacrifice of justice.

Giving thanks for creation

But what I hope to demonstrate goes beyond this, deliberately arranging thematic elements into his Office intended to teach us just why we should praise God, through judicious thematic arrangements of psalms that encourage us to contemplate God's wondrous nature in and of itself; his work of creation; his providential guidance of history; and above all the work of salvation effected by his only son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, during his time on earth.

I will come back to the way these key themes unfold in the Office in more depth later in this series, but for now let me provide a brief teaser, around the theme of the days of creation in the Office.

In the address at Heiligkeuz I mentioned earlier, Pope Benedict XVI  mentioned God's work of creation as the preeminent reason for our praise and adoration of him:

It is offered to the triune God who, above all else, is worthy “to receive glory, honour and power” (Rev 4:11), because he wondrously created the world and even more wondrously renewed it. [4]

In the Benedictine Office, Vespers each day, Saturday aside, has long featured a set of hymns  traditionally attributed to St Gregory the Great, each of which allude to the relevant day of creation.  On Sunday, for example, Lucis Creator Optime runs  'O blest creator of the light, who makest the day with radiance bright, and oer the forming world didst call the light from chaos first of all'. [5] On Wednesday, Caeli Deus sanctissime sets out the creation of the sun, moon, stars, firmament and time, saying exlicitly, 'Thou, when the fourth day was begun, didst frame the circle of the sun, and set the moon for ordered change, and planets for their wider range...''

Their placement at Vespers could of course, be independent of the psalms selected for that hour, simply reflecting the wording of Genesis ('evening and morning the xth day').

But in fact I think one can find explicit references to the relevant day of creation in the psalms set for the hour; references that would have been evident to readers steeped in the Patristic viewpoint shared by St Benedict at least.

On Monday (feria secunda), for example, Psalm 113's mention of the waters of division of the Red Sea and Jordan were often seen by the Father's as paralleling the division of the waters on the second day of creation.

And perhaps the clearest reference of all is on Wednesday (feria quarta), where Psalm 135 takes us through the story of creation in poetic form, stopping at the creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day:

Praise the Lord, for he is good...Who made the heavens in understanding... Who established the earth above the waters...Who made the great lights: for his mercy endureth for ever...The sun to rule the day: for his mercy endureth for ever...The moon and the stars to rule the night: for his mercy endureth for ever.

But the reasons for building these themes into the Office go beyond simply instructing us so that we can properly praise God I think; rather it goes to the idea that by becoming labourers in the vineyard, we become co-creators with God, participating and helping to bring about the work of binging the universe to its ultimate destiny.

 More on that anon; in the meantime, you can find the next part in this series here.

Notes

[1] (Domine labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam).  See RB 9, 42.

[2] RB 9; all quotes from Scripture are from the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version.

[3] See for example, Pope Benedict XVI, Address during visit to Heiligenkeuz Abbey, September 2007.

[4] ibid.

[5] Translations of the hymns in this paragraph are from Collegeville (from the Monastic Diurnal, reprinted Farnborough, 2005).